Still here, a bit slower then before due to me learning hammer and working on a mod as well.
I did post an entry for the "circular" competition though :)

Good ideas are hard to come by.

@nintendo.erk: Yeah, I saw. It was good to see this happen. I'm working on a great map for Circular, so there will be competitoin. :)

@cyhborg: Is it this bad that you won't submit a map with a less good idea? or are you referring to having a writers block? Is it perhaps that you can't make something in 2 weeks of time?

I'm basically focussing on the Hammer compos right now as I don't have the time or the genius to think of and realize good puzzle ideas on a bi-weekly basis

I'm still here but I'm in college so can't make chambers very often due to the crappy internet not allowing me to access Steam properly (I'm typing this in Chrome) but I still make chambers once every couple of weeks when I can get WiFi which doesn't use proxies which limit steam's functionality. I can't play or publish chambers while I'm here, but I'll try and submit a chamber to the next competition if I can. :-)

Don't disband the group, we all enjoy it! I think that for a lot of people, forcing creativity is hard. I can't count how many times I've sat down and said "Right, let's make an awesome chamber" and then spend an hour coming up with concepts that don't work and then just thinking "Eh, screw it, I can't think of anything. I must be rubbish at making chambers if I can't make them on demand all the time!"

That sounds ridiculous, because it is. Of course I'm not bad because I can't churn out test chambers constantly like GLaDOS can. People just need time to think of ideas and people have to let their creativity flow naturally. :-D I think the group is great and it really gets my creative juices flowing, but not everyone can submit every week, because as cyhborg said, good ideas are hard to come up with. Seriously, getting an idea for a test chamber which is original and challenging, and which works, is the hardest part.

TL;DR Don't disband the group, we love it! Some people can't submit every week due to the fact that coming up with ideas is hard sometimes. Other times it's easy.

Oh yeah, also, people might be too busy...

:-P

Started new business earlier this year and things have got rolling, so been busy with work and my 2 kids in school and their afterschool activities.

I did make a simple map for circular though! :-D

Also, my Steam was fucked up for me for months as well as Portal, so I couldn't get a map to build. Finally got my SSD and reverted back to Windows 8 instead 8.1 that was causing me problems. The group will go through periods like this. I think it's inevitable.

Rock on peeps!

I think the main reason there's not a lot of people is because it's September. Summer vacation has ended. A lot of people have to either start going to school again or start focusing on their job again.

For me, It looks like I've been quite inactive with map making in general, having only published 2 new maps the past YEAR. My reason being is that the past year has without a doubt been the most busiest year in my life. Having a job for the first time created quite a mess in my usual schedule, removing a lot of time I was using for Portal.

The past year I've also moved from Belgium to Canada, then to The Netherlands, then to the USA, then back to The Netherlands, then back to the USA, and I'm moving AGAIN in 2-3 weeks.

That being said, I have been going through I dunno how many concepts and ideas I randomly came up with. It's fairly easy to come up with ideas, it doesn't take that much time. The big problem usually becomes creating a working puzzle around it, with the design standards I demand for myself. Usually the map concepts also don't exactly work, let alone work with the running competitions. I have been trying to create maps that had to do with the running competition, but like all the other maps they failed to work out.

I wouldn't end this group. Like Demon Arisen said, forcing creativity is not a good idea. I think doing a competition every 2 weeks is asking a bit too much from people who have a lot of things to do and have a lot on their mind. Maybe the better idea would be to make the competitions last a bit longer. 3 weeks or even a month.

I was thinking something similar about the comps being 1 month long and then back to 2 weeks during summer.

If we go for one month (which is fine by me) I don't see us going back to 2 weeks during summer for the simple reason that the lack of submissions started around the beginning of the summer holidays, maybe a little bit before. I saw this as an indication: people are on holidays. But now that they're over and the usual entries haven't returned, I started to get more worried.

Stop being a worried wart. :-P We all still love the game.

+1 :D

Okay, I just stopped worrying. Can I start again now? This is getting on my nerves. XD

LP, we love the group, don't worry! :-D

Also, Maybe some people are having a Portal 2 burnout. I've had it multiple times. They'll probably come back.

^All of the above. Nuff said. ;-)